Hydraulics

Pressure transducer
With LMS™ Amesim™ Student Edition

Introduction
This tutorial deals with a hydraulic transducer.
It explains how a piston rod connecting two pistons of different diameters can be used to reduce or amplify
the pressure in a hydraulic system.
First we will define the equations describing the behavior of the hydraulic transducer.
Then we will use the LMS Amesim Student Edition, part of Simcenter™ portfolio, in order to validate easily
and quickly the results.

→ Let’s consider it with a practical example: a pressure transducer with a piston of Area A1 on one side
and a piston of Area A2 at the other side.
A1 A2

F1
p1 F2 p2

Figure 1: Pressure transducer

Let’s answer to the following questions:

A pressure p1 acts on the piston surface area A1. The piston rod is transferring the resulting Force F1 up onto
the smaller piston with the surface area A2.
a) Can pressure p2 be anticipated as greater, smaller or equal to p1?
b) What is the value of p2?

Input data:
• A1 = 100 cm²
• A2 = 10 cm²
• p1 = 6 bar

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Theory and practical application
Considering that:

 =
 (1)
And the mathematical relationship between the force and the pressure:

= (2)

We can write:
 ∗  =  ∗  (3)
 :

 = ∗  (4)


a) Can pressure p2 be anticipated as greater, smaller or equal to p1?

From this equation (4), we can deduce that if A1 > A2, then p2 > p1.

b) What is the value of p2?

From (4), we can compute, taking into account the numerical data:

 100
 = ∗  = ∗6
 10

Finally, p2 = 60 bar

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Simulation, validation and practice with LMS Amesim Student Edition
1. Building the sketch
In sketch mode , the model of the system (ref. figure 2) can be built easily and fast, selecting the following
components and connecting them together:
• In the hydraulic library:
Component Icon Comment
1 pressure source Used to define P1
3 hydraulic restrictors

2 pressure sensors Used to compare pressure a t side 1 and side

2.
2 hydraulic actuators with single shaft

1 hydraulic tank
1 hydraulic zero flow source
1 fluid definition icon Used to define the hydraulics properties of
the fluid
2 hydraulic 3 ports node

• In the mechanical library:

Component Icon Comment
1 mass with 2 ports

• In the signal library:

Component Icon Comment
2 signal sinks

Trick: You can easily rotate or flip your

components on the sketch.
• Rotation: select the component and
click with the mouse wheel (or use
Ctrl + R)
• Flip: select the component and click
with the mouse right button (or use
Ctrl + M)

Figure 2: transducer model

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 2. Selecting submodels

In this example, in submodel mode , submodels can be quickly selected using the “premier submodel”
.

3. Setting parameters
In parameter mode , we will define the following values (default values are kept for other parameters):

Component Icon Parameters

pressure source • number of stages = 1
• pressure at start of stage 1 = 6 bar
• pressure at end of stage 1 = 6 bar
hydraulic actuators 1 • piston diameter = sqrt((4*100)/PI) cm
• rod diameter = 0
hydraulic actuators 2 • piston diameter: sqrt((4*10)/PI) cm
• rod diameter = 0
• #displacement of piston = 0.29 m
Trick: you can easily change the units in the parameter window. Just click on the unit of a parameter and
select another one in the list of options.

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 4. Running the simulation and analyzing the results
In simulation mode , we can run the simulation . Then, it is easy and fast to plot temporal results, just
dragging and dropping any variable from the variable window to the sketch. For instance, you can plot the
sensors pressure in order to get the value of p1 and p2 (Figure 3Error! Reference source not found.) and
check the results evaluated before.
As we could expect, p2 = 60 bar.

Figure 3: Simulation results

Conclusion
With this tutorial, we considered a pressure transducer.

We have explained the impact of the piston diameters on the amplification of the pressure. We have described
the equations defining the behavior of the system and we applied them on a concrete case with numerical
values.

Finally, we built a simple hydraulic model in LMS Amesim Student Edition that makes possible to validate
our results.

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